In conventional stores, a customer collects items in a shopping cart or a hand-held basket, and brings the collected items to a cashier. Typically, the cashier must scan a barcode that is printed or placed on each item that the customer is purchasing, and a point-of-sale (POS) system determines the total price of the collected items. However, this method for checking out a customer in a store is inefficient. A cashier must scan each item purchased by every customer who shops at the store. If too many customers want to check out of the store at the same time, a customer may have to wait in line for a long time before a cashier can check out the customer from the store. Some stores parallelize this process by making more than one cashier and POS system available to customers. However, stores must pay cashiers to be available to check out customers, and thus additional cashiers may be prohibitively expensive for stores.
Some stores include automated point-of-sale systems wherein a customer uses the point-of-sale system directly to purchase their items and check out of the store without a cashier. However, these automated POS systems can still be prone to long lines, and the unfamiliar user interfaces can be difficult for a customer to use.